The agriculture industry is widely influenced by new technologies and methods adopted by farmers to improve their farming operations. A main staple of technology is that of weights and measures for calibration and comparison in precision agriculture technology.
Grain harvesting operations today involve the use of precision agriculture technology to theorize the volume and quantity of yield harvested by a storage carrier such as a combine harvester and precision yield monitoring technology. Commonly within the scope of a grain harvesting operation, the combine harvester offloads its grain payload into another storage carrier, such as a mobile hopper, a wagon, or grain cart, to facilitate the transfer of grain out of the field and further to another destination on or off the farm.
Today electronic scales are equipped on the storage carriers, such as wagons and grain carts utilized to offload the grain from the combine harvester and transfer it out the field. The advancement of electronic scale equipment over time has evolved to support methods of recording weight automatically from the hoppers of wagons and grain carts, however, these methods can be flawed and may result in a lack of recognition of the movement of grain, known as the load, due to hardware failure, design, and/or insufficient algorithms tied to weight change only to recognize loading and unloading events.
Commonly the weight change algorithm associated with the recognition of the movement of agriculture commodity into or out of a storage carrier, and recording of weight, requires low pass filters with a large threshold of weight to be loaded or unloaded. This method provides a flaw that if the large threshold of weight transfer is not achieved, the recognition of weight change will not be initiated and the event will not be recorded. Additionally, these methods can be affected by the travel of the grain cart over terrain, providing false recognition of weight change and inaccurate record of loading or unloading events, specifically if the large threshold is reduced to a smaller threshold value.
Other methods include recognition of Power Take Off (PTO) shaft speed associated with driving the powertrain on a grain cart for unloading operations, or a combination of weight change and PTO shaft speed recognition. While these methods may be accurate, they involve a high degree of specialized hardware placement associated with the PTO shaft, and the measurement of revolution speed of rotating parts from the drivetrain system of a grain cart. Commonly the hardware placement is problematic and requires maintenance and replacement due to the failure or damage of the hardware. These methods are limited such that they can only be utilized on a hopper body that uses a powered unloading apparatus, such as an auger, conveyor, vacuum system, or other embodiment to transport or move the grain out of the storage carrier. These methods, or combination of methods, do not work within storage carrier systems which use gravity to transport the agriculture commodity out of the storage carriers, such as a semi-trailer or a grain wagon.
What is needed therefore is a method or methods that can address the above identified problems in the state of the art.